by Bernard Carpenter, TCW
ON May 25, 2020, Memorial Day here in America, a man died on a street in a rundown part of South Minneapolis. He died whilst being restrained by a Minneapolis police officer. He was arrested after a clerk in a nearby convenience store suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and called the police.
The man who died was George Floyd, a career criminal who had served eight separate jail terms on various charges, mostly fairly routine drug offences and criminal trespass, but also ‘aggravated robbery’, including ‘aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon’, for which he served four years of a five-year sentence. The lengthy prison sentence resulted from his having taken part in a violent home invasion, during the course of which he pointed a gun at a woman’s ‘abdominal area’ in order to force her to reveal the location of any hidden money or drugs and stood by while an accomplice pistol-whipped her when she started screaming.
Floyd was black; the police officer, Derek Chauvin, who restrained him and was later found guilty of murdering him by asphyxiation, was white. Had the races been reversed, no one, apart from their friends and relatives, would know their names today, and the world would be a very different place indeed.
At the time of his death, Floyd was aged 46 and had five children, all with different mothers, and two grandchildren. He grew up in a historically black area of Houston, Texas, living there in public housing with his mother and siblings after his father abandoned the family when Floyd was just two. The area was plagued by high rates of crime, and unemployment was four times higher than elsewhere in the region. Many in the area, like Floyd, were raised in fatherless homes, the elephant in the room that few are prepared to acknowledge as the main cause of disproportionate rates of violent crime between blacks and other demographics. I make no excuses for him, but it’s hard to overlook the moral poverty in which men like Floyd grew up – moral poverty being, in my opinion, far more pernicious than its economic equivalent. Those Democratic politicians who engineered the destruction of the intact black family during the 1960s by instituting government policies that encouraged single-parent households headed by mothers have much to answer for.